| By Drew Broach | Deputy metro editor
CAR DEALER CROONER: Got your Jazz Fest tickets? It returns today from the pandemic hiatus of 2020 and 2021, and you'll want to read up on colorful car dealer Ronnie Lamarque singing at Economy Hall, food writer Ian McNulty’s recommendations, the pre-fest parties and morning concerts and the important fest figures who will be memorialized this year. Oh, and are the Red Hot Chili Peppers the right replacement for the Foo Fighters?
FAMILY TRAGEDY: The 3-year-old girl who died by gunshot in a French Quarter apartment this week was identified Thursday, and police booked her brother with negligent homicide – and with second-degree murder in an unrelated killing in Treme. Police said the toddler, Autumn Barthelemy, shot herself with a gun that 18-year-old Donell Barthelemy left unsecured in their apartment.
DOUBLING UP: Since Hurricane Ida blew through in August, leading to a collapse in garbage pickup in the parts of New Orleans handled by Metro Service Group, Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s administration has been paying a second firm to take over about 15% of the routes Metro once handled. That move has cost taxpayers more than $1 million and counting, records show. But it hasn’t hurt Metro at all: The company is still being paid as though it was doing all of the work outlined in its contract.
LOST AT SEA: The public docket containing interviews with surviving crew members of the Seacor Power has been opened, providing new details of the 2021 liftboat capsizing that killed six people and left seven missing and presumed dead in the Gulf of Mexico.
EXIT PLAN: As word gets around Oakmont Apartments that New Orleans government will clear out the hazardous complex in Algiers and pay to relocate tenants, some residents are packing up or scrambling to find apartments to keep from being sent to hotel rooms. Little wonder that they wish to leave Oakmont, where one occupied unit’s walls are streaked with orange spray paint - applied last year to mark mold that no one has come to remove - and mushrooms sprout from the crevices of a kitchen closet that is caked in mold and crawling with roaches.
Thanks for starting your Friday with us. Check out NOLA.com for more news throughout the day. D.B. | 
